A street scene from Bergen. This is a photograph taken with the camera that is built into my mobile telephone the day before the concert. Bergen is 14 hours south (by boat) of my small home town, and as I rarely travel away you can imagine I felt a little bit apprehensive about being in such a large city with so many strangers.

Joe Way wrote:Hi Geoffrey,
Wonderful pictures, we enjoyed them very much. Bergen looks to be a beautiful place for a Leonard Cohen concert. Anne & I will see him in Roscoe's home town of Austin, Texas.

Joe

wish i could be there. it was nice being in bergen. everybody was talking about leonard cohen. book shops had big selections of books by him and about him on display that i'd never seen before; i bought one or two. record shops filled their windows and shelves with CDs and DVDs that contained his work. posters advertising the concert were glued onto every wall and fence. buskers were on many street corner singing his songs. leonard's official music came out of loud speakers at market places and the newspapers were filled with headlines about him. a sort of 'cohenmania' swept over the whole town. but i kept my wits about me and didn't get caught up in the hysteria. i kept sane by just observing it all and pretending i was an alien from another galaxy come to study human behaviour. i had a money-belt strapped to my upper torso, under my shirt, so that pick-pockets couldn't easily get at the banknotes, and i avoided making eye-contact with people when i walked along the pavement, and when a lady with a map in her hand asked me for directions i just looked straight ahead and brushed past her as if she was air. i know all their tricks, you see. they're as cunning as a cart-load of monkeys but i stayed alert and they didn't get me. during the concert i walked around, absorbing the atmosphere, digesting the impulses and just let my senses receive vibrations and signals that nobody else seemed to be picking up. i looked at all the faces staring in one direction, and it was as if they were hypnotised. in the huge crowd of 12,000 people i felt alone, in a way. thousands of vaginas all around me, and not one of them had i access to. everybody who'd come to hear the music wore a uniform of anoraks with casual clothes; i was dressed in a suit and tie, but that didn't make me less avid an admirer of leonard's work than anyone else. the security guards wore illuminative yellow vests over their coats. those guys were the only ones who didn't seem hypnotised, but they all had a special expression on their faces, a sort of unapproachable expression, a cold and superior expression that made them look important. i wondered how anybody could love someone who could look like that at the flick of a switch. i have never had a boss dictating to me what i should or should not do. i wouldn't accept such a situation. it's not right to let a person govern and own you. well, i did work in a hotel for a few weeks when i was young, so i do know what it is like, i suppose. he was a horrible guy, big fat guy called israel finn. looked a bit like alfred hitchcock, especially those sloppy lips - but hitchcock was an all right guy, at least according to my intuition; i never met him. here is a picture, joe, from my camera at bergen.

thank you arlene and mary for these uplifting comments. as you have been so nice to me here is a little bonus. it is a short but very positive review of leonard's concert that i found in a national weekly christian newspaper published on 7th september 2012 in bergen, called 'norge i dag' (norway today'). i have not time to translate the entire article, but it opens with:

"Who can make 11,000 Bergenites sing 'Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah" in unison on a chilly August evening at the Bergenhus Fortress? Yes, a Jew from Canada. His name is Leonard Cohen."